ON ANY given Friday night, perchance out of passion for lofty culture, one could see my friend Mike McGovern and myself under the historic gaze of the great humorist James Thurber’s world-famous cartoon characters.

It was decades ago and I’m sure those sometimes hilarious characters might have been frowning at us since we were beating the living daylights out of each other and our blood would spill onto the floor of Costello’s.

Costello’s, a former speakeasy, owned by “Big Tim” Costello, in 1929 became the best-known gin mill of the 20th century.

At first it was on Third and 46th Street and bounding through the door, under a giant life-size portrait of “Big Tim,” were the cream of the world’s news hounds, writers, artists, humorists and cartoonists.

There was Ernest Hemingway – whose walking stick hung behind the bar after he broke it over the head of fellow author John O’Hara – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, AJ Liebling, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Jim Brady, cartoonist Bill Gallo, the Post’s Paul Rigby and an assortment of cops, high-rollers and members of the notorious Westies gang.

There was also me, McGovern of the Daily News, and an assortment of English, Australian and Irish foreign correspondents – all lesser lights than Breslin, but just as noisy.

And of course there was the ghost of Thurber. The amazing series in The New Yorker magazine cartoon section of “The Battle Of The Sexes” was drawn by Thurber on the barroom walls during the Depression as payment for his bar tab.

In 1975, young Timmy moved the bar around the corner to 44th Street and with him came those invaluable Thurbers. That meant taking a huge chunk of wall to reinstate in the new bar.

Then disaster. After young Timmy sold the place in 1992 and subsequent owners took over the place over a period of months, the priceless Thurber cartoons mysteriously disappeared. I know Timmy had nothing to do with their disappearance because they were there long after he left. The mystery of their disappearance remains as they grow in leaps and bounds in value.

Whoever filched those Thurber cartoons had to slice out a 24-by-4-foot chunk of wall without damaging the art.

“It was like a death in the family. To hell with the money,” said “Irish” John Gallagher late last year before he went to that great barroom in the sky at the age of 86. “We felt we all owned them, bartenders, waiters, cooks and even the customers.”

Throughout today, again some of the great artists and cartoonists will do a repeat performance of the great 1976 paint-in and start on a new wall of fame, sort of Faces on the Barroom Wall, lending their own genius to yet another mural.

And it will also draw attention to one of the great art heists of history.